Inadvertent Online Resumes Continue To Cause Some Problems

from the broken-off dept

It's pretty common for people to do Google background checks on prospective employees (or potential dates) these days, so it's a little surprising to see people still put all sorts of information that could harm their job prospects online. A substitute judge in Las Vegas lost his position last week, after some people noticed that his MySpace profile listed his personal interests as, among other things, "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's ass." A local district attorney alleged that this displayed a bias against prosecutors, and asked that the judge be recused from his criminal cases, but court administrators went a step further and decided not to use his services any more. The judge, or now ex-judge, says that, basically, he was trying to be funny, and that the overstatement on his page was obvious. That may be the case, but given his position -- and his political ambitions -- it's hard to imagine that he couldn't foresee any problems from putting the comments up online.

Re: Sad, though...

Not really new

The fact that this guy got sacked for saying the wrong thing is not new. This has been going on in various forms since humans learned to talk. In the past this same circumstance could very well have occured in a bar where an overly inebriated fellow happens to boast jokingly of his penchant for excersizing his skills at podiatric proctology with certain members of counsel. Only to be overheard by someone related to counsel who happens to be on the unfortunate inebriates docket.

The only difference now is that the bar is much larger and the memory of the listeners is much longer.

This lesson has been taught numerous times already and all that's left is to pity those that refuse to learn it.

Survival of the fittest

I love seeing things like this. I view it as Darwinism. Every person that puts that type of stuff on the web is one less person that I have to compete against for a job or apparently a date. Go youtube, facebook, myspace, et al.

MySpace = Attention Whores

please

There had to be more to it than this innocuous comment to oust this dude.
It was more likely a confirmation of his already established dislike for prosecutors. Probably "the straw that broke the camel's back".

An equivalent view

"Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's ass."

It sounds to me like he wanted to uphold the ethics of the position. And some good Christians put a spin on it and got the context seen from their side.

Sometimes the prosecution gets unfair. They have rules. And they are "his side" in that they work for the government too. He has to exercise control and impose imitations on all who come before him.

He could have also said - "Breaking my foot off in some lawyer's ass ... and improving my ability to break my foot off in in some lawyer's ass." - and it would have been just as true. Simply he was thinking about the prosecutors at that moment when he wrote the list of interests, maybe something happened that week. MySpace is personal, not a life-statement-canon.

This poor guy!

What has happened to the freedom of speech in America? I support this judge all the way. Where in our public doctrines does it demand that public officials not be real people? If anything; those comments prove that he is a person like the rest of us...and therefore fit to be a judge!

Prosecutors

I served on a grand jury recently, so I know first hand how prosecutors work.
One even used the term Piling ON when enumerating charges.
Our system is broken and is again starting to lose faith with the people.
And all that happens is more laws get passed that you can run afoul of.

But then again maybe the American public needs to fucking grow up. Political correctness has gone to far, we're becoming an impotent nation that can't do anything because we might offend someone or another. Grow up people.

Re:

Political Correctness squashes thought. What ever happened to having a good old fashioned debate on the merits and drawbacks of both sides of a point of view? Now, you better not say anything that might upset someone that is part of any group, or you might as well have said it to the entire group.

I think this judge said 'prosecuters' in an effort to not say someone specifics name.

Go ahead and offend someone, start a debate, make people use their minds.

People really need to consider having their real name on a blog or anything else that is public. I have a blog, its pretty boring, but I do like to write about some business issues, DRM, whatever. Why would I want my name connected with an opinion piece when in the future, I may want to work for a company that is against that position?

Google searches overrated

Google searches are overrated in the first place. Have you ever Googled yourselves? Perfectly upright professionals share names (and nothing else, I might add) with porn queens and recently released convicts, as well as lesser politically incorrect people. Admittedly a MySpace page is pretty damning, but otherwise how is a searcher going to know which person is which? Libraries have had to deal with these kinds of confusions practically since their inception.